


undreamt

by someryn



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Depression, F/M, Insomnia, Pretty Much Pointless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 16:41:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8453896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/someryn/pseuds/someryn
Summary: Bella/Paul. Bella can’t sleep. Depression and insomnia.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Be warned that this is pretty much pointless, but... since I couldn’t stop writing it until it was done... here it is.

Bella looked down at her phone, back to the blank wall across her room from where she was curled up on her bed, and back to her phone.

Her battery was dying. She needed to fix that.

She was overcome with that sense of despair and overwhelming impossibility that lurked, always, in the corner of her vision these days.

She glanced at her phone again. Nothing.

If she’d had the energy, maybe she would have scrolled through the weeks of text messages and then her call history. Letters and numbers that spelled out the only thing that had mattered in her life since _he_ left.

Now he was her past, too. Nothing in ten days. She’d been nothing, too, in that time.

She looked down at the phone in her hands again. Just beyond it was her nightstand, her car keys indifferently tossed on it next to the bedside lamp.

She bit her lip. Keys. She could use them. She hadn’t driven herself to La Push in so long - nowhere farther than the ten-minute drive to school (and he didn’t even like her doing that).

Could she do it? Sometimes she lost a few seconds at a time, slices of her life that were gone to her forever. Probably not a good idea while driving.

Well, she wasn’t known for having good ideas, anyway.

Exhausted from making that decision, she forced herself to follow through with it.

She rose unsteadily. She could stand, good. That was step one.

 _Clothes_ , she thought next. She didn’t really care what she was wearing, but she remembered enough to know that she should care.

She opened her closet door, fighting off waves of apathy. She hadn’t even had the energy to put her clothes on hangers. There was just one pile of clean clothes and another of dirty clothes on the floor.

She pulled out the first two things she saw. Faded jeans, holes at the knees. Fine. Black t-shirt, “New York” written in white text written across the front. She frowned down at it. She’d never been to New York.

Then she remembered. It was Rachel’s. Bella had stood outside in the rain, lost in thought, and hadn’t even noticed she was getting soaked. He’d brought her back inside and made her change. The basketball shorts he’d given her were probably somewhere in her closet, too.

Clothes, check. She stepped into the bathroom and washed her face and brushed her teeth, already tempted to collapse back down on her bed halfway through getting the toothpaste on the brush.

She blinked, and there was blackness for a few precious seconds.

Her brush was hanging limply from her fingers when she opened her eyes again. She hurriedly brought it to her lips before the dollop of toothpaste fell off it.

She stared at her bed for a few seconds when she returned to her room, but there was no point in staying there. It wasn’t like she could sleep better in her bed than she could anywhere else.

Phone. Wallet. Keys.

She grabbed her Converses before stepping outside. She’d need those. Charlie would tell her, _what if your truck broke down and you had to walk_.

She didn’t have the energy to put them on, though. It was all being directed to her legs - walking toward her truck. Her fingers - opening the door. Her feet - pressing the brakes. Her hands - shifting into drive.

They were actions that should have flowed together in effortless harmony. A lot of things in her life had once been like that.

Now she was stumbling jerkily through the motions of living, feeling like she was trying to complete a task with instructions that had steps missing every other line.

She didn’t remember making the drive once she’d pulled up at his house. She knew she’d lost herself a few times, that the truck had dropped to almost idling speed when she’d come back.

 _Good thing he keeps the tires aligned_ , she thought dully. Otherwise she might have driven into a ditch.

She started to climb out of her truck before she remembered. Shift into park. Switch off the ignition. Unbuckle her seat belt. Now she could get out.

She let herself in once she reached the door. She didn’t care if it was rude. She didn’t have the energy to knock.

 _Jake, Jake, Jake_. If he wasn’t here, she’d wait. She needed to stop for a while, anyway, to lie still and wait for the world to stop blurring around the edges.

She tapped at his door and then turned the doorknob slowly, giving him time to call out if she was walking in on him doing anything scarring.

He wasn’t. He was asleep. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him asleep.

She watched enviously as his breath rose and fell steadily, his face relaxed. He’d probably been asleep for hours.

Maybe that was why he didn’t want to be around her anymore. He thought she was stupid for not being able to do something so basic as sleep for more than a few minutes at a time (on her best days).

She slid down to the floor and braced her back against the wall in the corner of his room, pulling her knees up to her chest. She usually got a little reprieve around Jake, the nightmares muffled with him. Still there, but sometimes her seconds became minutes with him.

Her eyes returned to Jake when she heard his breathing change, and he inhaled sharply like he smelled breakfast or something -

-Bella remembered liking to cook once. Gone now, like so much else -

Then he was sitting up, peering at her in confusion.

“Bells?” he said, and he must still have been too sleepy to remember to talk to her in that tone he’d spoken to her with almost two weeks ago. She waited for it to come back.

“What are you doing here?”

Like he had no idea. Like he’d forgotten that without him, there was no life for her.

She shrugged miserably, and his expression was a confusing mix of agony and sympathy.

“Bella, you can’t be here,” he said gently, and she knew he didn’t mean in his room. “I told you. I’m not good for you anymore.”

“You’re _something_ for me, Jake,” she said. “Nothing else is anything.” Her words were a mess, but she knew he’d understand what she meant. He always had. “Bad is fine. I’ll take that, too.”

He let out a long sigh. “I _can’t_ ,” he said, like the words were being forced out of him. Then his eyes widened. “How did you get here, Bells? Please tell me you didn’t-”

“Like you were going to come get me,” she said dully.

He rose out of bed and stood before her. He was bigger than she remembered, she realized with confusion. She knew teenage boys grew fast, but he had to have grown two or three inches in less than two weeks.

And his hair was cropped short now, his beautiful chin-length black hair gone. “Come on, Bells, I’ll drive you back.” He saw the expression in her eyes and looked pained. “Look, I’ll ask - I’ll see if I can still come see you. He’ll-” he swallowed. “I’ll make him understand. Okay? I can’t stay with you right now. But I promise I’ll find a way to see you.”

Ignoring her attempts to back further against the wall, he took her hand and pulled her upright. His skin was burning up. “Jake-” she protested, but he was already tugging her out the front door.

As he plucked her keys from her pocket she heard a deep male voice call out from their left. “Jacob. Where do you think you’re going?”

Jake’s shoulders stiffened, and Bella turned with him to see four boys walking toward them. All four were shirtless, barefoot, muscular, and tall. Jake looked just like them now.

Bella remembered Sam, and there was Embry, she realized with dull surprise. She’d seen the other two before but didn’t know their names.

“I’ve got to take her home, Sam,” Jake said stiffly.

“She drove herself here, she can drive herself back,” the boy to Sam’s left said with a sneer. She thought he was the most handsome of them, tall without being the tallest and muscular without being the biggest.

Jake stepped beside and partly in front of her until they were all at a standoff, just a few feet separating her and Jake from the other boys. Bella rested her forehead against Jake’s newly muscled arm and closed her eyes for just a moment, unable to keep her head up any longer.

“Look at her!” Jake said angrily. “She’s worse _now_ because you’re making me stay _away_ -”

“ _Enough_ ,” Sam said sharply, an odd undercurrent of authority in his voice.

Jake’s mouth snapped shut, but his eyes were furious on Sam. His body was vibrating, and Bella pressed her hand against his arm.

“It’s okay, Jake,” she said softly. It wasn’t, really, but it was a little better knowing Jake hadn't  _wanted_ to stay away from her. “Give me back my keys and I’ll leave.”

That didn’t have the soothing effect she wanted it to. Jake’s eyes snapped to Sam’s. “That what you want, Sam?” he said. “You don’t care if she crashes her truck? You say we’re protectors, but I guess that doesn’t extend to white girls?”

His shaking got worse. Bella watched in horrified fascination, her attention captured the most that it had been in months. Sam’s eyes didn’t leave Jake’s, watching him warily - not like he was afraid, but almost resigned.

“Paul, get her out of the way,” he said, and that note of power was there again.

The beautiful boy with the ugly expression sighed but moved swiftly toward her. “Come here, girl,” he said, his large hand encircling her upper arm as he tugged her toward him and away from Jake’s shuddering form.

Bella was already preparing to pull away from him, or at least turn to stare at Jake fearfully, but for a split second there was nothing. Pure, infinite blackness.

She took in a sharp breath as she came back to herself. She had apparently stumbled, since she wasn’t quite where she remembered being before. The boy - Paul - was looking down at her strangely, and his annoyed expression had been replaced with one of confusion.

Remembering where she was, she twisted around sharply, and it was either quick or unexpected enough that she was able to turn in time to see Jake’s form shimmer and shake. Suddenly there were bits of fabric flying into the air and an enormous wolf - a _wolf_ \- stood where Jake had been.

“Holy _shit_ ,” she breathed, her apathy wavering for just a split second. She thought she heard Paul snort out a laugh behind her.

And a second later, when where Sam had been standing there was now an enormous black wolf, she wasn’t even really that surprised. Paul’s hand was back on her forearm, she realized, and without thinking about it, she leaned into him so that her forehead was pressed against his heavily muscled bicep.

The blackness dragged her down, beautiful and nothingness and perfect. She came back to herself to see Paul staring down at her, clearly unnerved, his hand tightening on her as her knees buckled.

“Sam said to take her to Emily’s,” Jake’s friend Embry called. He was walking out of the forest, buttoning his denim shorts like he’d just pulled them on. Bella glanced away hurriedly.

“Come on,” Paul said when she didn’t immediately follow him and Embry. He released his grip on her arm, and she immediately wanted his warmth back.

“We’re going to take your truck, Bella,” Embry said. He sounded much nicer than Paul did. “It’s a long walk if you don’t turn into a wolf.”

He was reaching into the grass and rose with her keys, which had fallen to the ground at some point after Jacob had become a giant wolf. She shook her head, try to suppress a giggle. Jake was a giant _dog_. That was his big secret. She’d thought he was in a _gang_. This was _nothing_.

“What’s wrong with her?” Paul asked as if she wasn’t there. Embry opened the passenger side door for her before moving to the driver’s side and pulling himself inside.

Bella scooted to the middle without protest. Just imagining having to drive right now made her want to curl into a ball and cry.

“She’s exhausted, aren’t you, Bells?” Embry asked as he turned the ignition. Paul slid in on her other side and slammed the passenger door shut behind him. “Sleep deprived. To a crazy extent,” he added, clearly for Paul’s benefit.

Bella shrugged. She wasn’t sure. This state she was in, whatever other people called it, was simply her normal.

She glanced at Paul from the corner of her eye, remembering the brief oblivion his touch had given her before he’d pulled away.

“Did the leech do something to her?” Paul asked, something very faintly like concern in his voice.

Bella heard the question and dismissed it when she realized it didn’t make sense. She’d never seen a leech in real life. Maybe it was an alternative medicine thing the tribe did. She let the boys’ words flow over her.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know.” Embry sounded uneasy. “We need to wait for Sam, Paul.”

Paul let out an annoyed huff but didn’t say anything else on the short drive to a house Bella hadn’t been to before. Embry was first to get out, and she slid across the bench seat after him, not knowing what else to do.

He gripped her arm when she stumbled and helped her to the ground. To her disappointment, the oblivion didn’t come with his touch. “Don’t stare at Emily, okay, Bella?” he whispered as he led her inside, Paul coming in behind them.

Bella made a movement that was somewhere between a shrug and a nod. She’d lost the capacity to be curious about anything months ago.

A tall, slim woman with almost waist-length straight black hair turned from the oven when they entered, pulling out a large casserole pan. “Hello, boys,” she said with a warm smile. It dragged one corner of her mouth up, but the other half of her face had three parallel, thick scars running down it from her forehead to her chin, just barely missing her eye.

Bella flicked her eyes immediately back to the woman, who was surveying her with curiosity. “Bella Swan?” she asked.

Embry snorted. “Who else?” When Bella hovered uncertainly in the middle of the room, Embry tugged her gently to one of the long couches in the living room, which opened directly onto the kitchen.

“Do you want anything to eat?” he asked. “Emily’s always got food around here.”

“Where’s Jake?” she whispered instead. “Is he coming back?”

Paul collapsed on the other sofa in the room with a plate of lasagna in his hand and stretched his long legs out along the cushions. “He always seems to get what he wants,” Paul said, sneering at her as he took a bite.

Embry sighed and went into the kitchen, returning with a plate of lasagna and a muffin. “Eat this,” he said, handing her the muffin as he sat beside her on the couch. She examined it like she’d never seen a muffin before. “Jake will kill me if you faint on my watch,” he said with a dry smile. “If you won’t sleep, at least eat.”

“I can’t,” she said immediately, not sure which one she was responding to. She closed her eyes, and a few seconds were gone again. When she opened her eyes again, both boys were staring at her. She looked down at her lap, where she’d dropped the muffin from fingers that had gone limp.

“Sorry,” she whispered, picking it up again. Embry and Paul shared an unreadable look.

Emily stepped into the living room with a plate piled high with more muffins. “Do you like cranberries, Bella?” she asked cheerfully. “If not I’ve got blueberry and lemon poppy seed as well.”

Bella glanced down at the muffin in her hand, noticing the scarlet spots that dotted it. “Thanks,” she said distantly. No matter how much she’d forgotten about herself and who she was, she tried never to be rude. “Cranberry is fine.”

Emily’s eyes were still on her expectantly, so Bella reluctantly took a bite. She expected it to taste like dirt in her mouth like almost everything did these days, but it was actually good, moist and soft and tangy from the cranberries.

“Is it okay?” Emily asked, and she sounded as if she actually cared about Bella’s answer. “I could heat up dog food and these guys would probably eat it,” she said, like she could read Bella’s mind. “I want to hear from someone who actually has standards.”

“Hey, I resent that!” the remaining boy Bella hadn’t met said, walking in the front door. Jared. He immediately took three muffins off the plate Emily had set in the middle of the coffee table and sprawled out next to Paul.

“Jake and Sam are coming,” he announced to the room.

“How much shit is Jake in?” Embry asked.

“A ton,” Jared said, shrugging. He raised his eyebrows at Bella. “He got what he wanted, though. So he pretty much thinks it was worth it.”

Bella had eaten half the muffin without realizing it, and she set it back down on the plate hastily, hoping she wouldn’t be sick. She wasn’t worth Jake’s pain. She never had been.

Then Jake’s newly huge frame was filling the doorway. “Doin’ okay, Bells?” her best friend asked cheerfully as Sam followed him in. He reached for the muffin she had just discarded and stuffed the whole thing into his mouth as he plopped down on her other side.

He wrapped his arm around her as he reached for another muffin. He was bigger and warmer than he she remembered, but he was still the same comforting Jake. She wished she could tell him that, but she didn’t even have the energy to lean into him.

“Is she in shock?” Jared asked.

Beside him, Paul snorted. “No, she’s like that all the time, isn’t she, Jacob? Your very own walking, talking zombie.”

Jake stiffened. “Don’t talk about her like that.” Whatever else her friend said, Bella tuned out unintentionally. She sometimes felt darkness at the corners of her vision, moving black shapes that she knew weren’t really there. Hallucinations. At least she wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t know them for what they were.

The buzzing, humming sound that sometimes filled her head was worse. Sometimes she forgot that wasn’t real and looked around to see if anyone was as bothered by it as she was.

She looked down at her white, frail hands. They were shaking. Jake grabbed another muffin from the table, broke it in half, and gave one to her, not pausing in his argument with Paul.

Sam sat down not long later, and then it was back to that leeches topic again, talking about guarding the rez and patrolling the borders and what that filthy bloodsucker wanted, and all the pieces finally connected for her.

“You’re talking about vampires,” she said stupidly. They all turned to stare at her.

“Did you really just zone out for ten minutes solid?” Paul asked.

She shrank back into Jake. He tightened his arm around her protectively. She wished she could sleep around Jake. He usually kept the hallucinations away, which was more than she could do on her own, but she’d never managed more than dozing.

Her thoughts drifted back to Paul, and her gaze snapped back to him. He’d clearly said something else and was waiting for her reply. Sam held up his hand to cut off Paul’s no doubt hostile retort.

“We know about the Cullens, Bella,” Sam said levelly, taking the burden of trying to come up with a response from her. “We have a treaty with them.” He cut his eyes to Jake, looking displeased. “One you apparently already know about, judging from Jacob’s memories.”

She felt Jake shrug against her, clearly not apologetic.

“A leech who isn’t a Cullen is killing hikers in this area. A red-haired female.”

“Victoria,” Bella supplied through numb lips. “Just take me to her and I’m sure she’ll leave you all alone.”

Sam looked momentarily speechless. “She wants you to come to her?”

“She wants to kill me,” Bella said simply. “If it’ll stop more deaths, you should just drop me off in the woods or wherever you last saw her, and she’ll find me.” She almost got her hopes up. It would be a noble death, in its way.

Jake growled - actually _growled_ \- beside her. Bella closed her eyes tiredly. Usually she did a better job of hiding her apathy from Jake. He didn’t deserve to have to deal with her shit, especially now that he clearly had so much of his own to handle.

“Calm _down_ , Jacob,” Sam said sternly. “We don’t give people up to leeches, and we don’t make deals with them. She’s not going to be our sacrifice.”

Emily came back into the room then, smiling. and Bella wondered if she’d heard the argument and interrupted on purpose. “I’m just pulling pizza out of the oven,” she said. “First come first serve.”

Despite the fact that Embry and Paul had eaten not twenty minutes prior, all four teenage boys were suddenly jostling each other, running in to the kitchen. Sam remained dignified and pulled Emily down, tugging her against him on the couch.

Emily turned her smile on Bella. “They’re something, aren’t they?” she said. “It’s a good thing my Sam can keep them in line.”

Sam growled something too low for Bella to hear, and Emily was laughing as he pulled her face toward him and started kissing her scars before finally moving to her lips.

Paul, who had apparently won the fight to the front of the line, curled his lip in disgust at Emily and Sam, who were getting much more affectionate on the couch he had been sitting on. He sat down at the end of the Bella’s couch instead, setting a plate piled high with pizza slices on the armrest beside him.

She couldn’t stop herself from glancing at him again. She wondered if he’d known what had happened when she’d touched him, or if he’d just thought that she’d randomly zoned out.

“You’re gonna have to get your own, girl,” he told her, and she realized he thought she wanted some of his pizza.

She shook her head, not even sure what she could say in response to that, but then Jake was sitting down beside her, nudging her a little closer to the middle so that he could use the armrest she’d been leaning against.

“Leave her alone, Paul,” Jake said, but he sounded almost mild. Bella wondered if part of the reason for the boys’ short fuses was being hungry. It was probably hard to eat enough to keep up with their physical activity.

Embry and Jared came back with their own plates, and Sam and Emily reluctantly separated to leave enough room for the two boys on the couch.

“Much better,” Emily said, looking around the room with a satisfied smile. It seemed Emily had the same thought about their hunger.

After a minute the conversation on the vampires and the Cullens and Victoria continued, albeit at a much lower level of tension.

Bella was leaning partly against Jake, but she could feel the black shapes and the buzzing noise again. It was getting worse. _She_ was getting worse.

Biting her lip, she scooted a little away from Jake. He didn’t seem to mind, even pulling back his arm so he could lean forward, gesturing with both hands as he argued about something with Sam.

Paul seemed to be relatively disengaged from the conversation. His plate was empty, and his legs were stretched out across the coffee table. Only his expression wasn’t relaxed, his eyes sharp as he followed his packmates’ conversation.

Bella inched toward him a little, already imagining the peace, the oblivion he could give her. If he would just stay _still_. She glanced around. No one else seemed to be paying attention to her. The buzzing grew louder.

That was enough to decide her. It had never been that bad before. She pulled her knees up onto the cushion and crawled along the length of the couch toward Paul.

Sam’s response to whatever Jake had said trailed off, and she felt every pair of eyes in the room fixate on her. No one looked more shocked than Paul, but thank god, he didn’t look like he was going to get up and run away. His brow was furrowed, his eyes piercing hers.

She didn’t speak. So was so close.

Then she had reached him, and without giving him a chance to react, she curled up on her side and laid her head down in his lap.

Her last awareness before oblivion claimed her was of Paul's large, warm hand coming down to rest uncertainly in her hair.

 

* * *

  
Her first thought when she opened her eyes was that the pounding was gone.

Her second was to wonder where she was.

The third was to wonder if she’d really done what she thought she’d done, which was curl up on the lap of a guy she didn’t know and who clearly hated her.

“You’re awake,” Paul said from above her, and the answer to that last question was clearly yes. There was no emotion she could pick out of his tone. The living room was empty now except for the two of them, and the shadows from the afternoon sunlight were longer than when she’d -

“I slept,” she realized with shock. She looked down at herself as if she thought she’d look different. She sat up slowly, knowing her head could start spinning any moment.

“Yeah, wish I could’ve,” Paul said, stretching out his legs and flexing his toes now that she was off of his legs. “Every time I even tried to shift you started whimpering.”

“Sorry,” she whispered. She just kept giving this guy more reasons to hate her.

He tilted his head and examined her, not making any pretense of doing anything else. “You’re still tired,” he said, his tone only barely a question.

She snorted a laugh. “I go through _life_ tired,” she said. “I can never sleep, though.” She blushed. “That’s why I went to you. Sorry.”

His intent gaze remained on her. “When I first touched you earlier I thought you were gonna pass out.”

“I blacked out for a couple seconds,” she said. “No sounds, no screaming. Just blackness. It was...” She trailed off. Unless he’d ever had sleep deprivation as bad as she had, words would never be enough to describe the feeling of release, of relief. “Incredible,” she finished awkwardly.

To her surprise, a smirk played at the corners of Paul’s lips. “Usually when girls say I’m incredible they’re talking about something else.”

It took Bella a minute, as tired as she still was, to understand what he was talking about it. She settled for scowling at him. “Gross.”

His smirk became a full-on grin, and that turned him from one of the most handsome men Bella had ever seen to _the_ most handsome man she’d ever seen. Edward had been beautiful, a pale remembrance of life. Paul _was_ life - breathing, arrogant, handsome aliveness.

“Come on.” She was too busy staring at him like an idiot to protest as he hooked his arm under her knees and another under her shoulders and started carrying her down the hall.

She twisted futilely in his grasp. “Paul, _what- Where_ -” She couldn’t decide what she wanted to ask first.

“You’re still exhausted, _I’m_ fucking exhausted from running patrols all night,” he said casually. “So we’re going to sleep.”

“Paul, I can’t-”

“Yeah, you can,” he said. He pushed open a door at the end of the hall to reveal a small guest bedroom and lay her down on the bed. He collapsed on his back beside her, his legs almost long enough to touch the footboard.

“We’re sleeping, Swan,” he repeated more firmly when she tried to sit up. He turned on his side and reached out to wrap his arm around her waist, pulling her toward him like she weighed nothing. He shifted around her so that her back was fully pressed against his chest, her legs tangling with his. “Better,” he said, sliding his arm down to rest across her stomach.

His heat, his touch, already had her hovering on the edge of sleep again. She soaked in the feeling greedily. “You don’t even like me,” she complained, even as she scooted more into his warmth.

“Eh.” She felt him shrug behind her, then the press of his lips against her ear. “You’re growing on me.”

Then she was falling into blessed darkness again, Paul’s heat and skin and scent protecting her all the way.


End file.
